Something I'm Not

by Lucy Beresford

  He massages away any doubts I might have regarding his suitability for the role. He proves himself extremely well briefed: about Keswick’s, naturally, but also about me. He makes me feel that of all the people he’s ever met, I am by far the most fascinating. He knows the subject of my university dissertation (I just adore Edith Wharton), and how much my bonus was last year (that’s impressive, Amber!). There’s even soya milk in a jug with the coffee (I’m lactose-intolerant, too – doesn’t it suck?). In his openness, and abundant emotional curiosity, I am reminded of Matt.

  Once I leave the hotel and the aura of the man’s charisma, I feel bereft.

  The heat in the city is as oppressive as in London. Sensible folk will be staying away until after Labour Day. For a while I wander aimlessly. I drift around boutiques, fingering impossibly wispy pieces of fabric. A vague plan to buy designer foodstuffs at Dean & DeLuca is thwarted when I find it closed for the day to be used as a film set.

  Eventually I find myself at Ground Zero. I clink in my heels up a metal staircase and stand on the raised iron platform. I stare into the crater below. My feet have swollen in the heat. They are sore where the tight leather chafes my skin. Leaning into a railing, I ease one blistered foot out of its shoe.

  Nothing has prepared me for this scene of desolation, the way the vast expanse of concrete flooring shimmers in the heat and appears to stretch to the horizon. The clang of metal on metal drifts upwards. Traffic hums in the background. The sun shines fiercely, bright and defiant. Workmen go about their business, wearing hard hats, their bronzed torsos stripped to the waist. And, in the face of their physicality, their task of active regeneration, I suddenly feel hollow, diminished. It is as though the question with my mother has always been: which headhunter will claim the first scalp? And I am suddenly hijacked by the desire to step off the ledge and never be bothered by her again.

  *

  The return flight that night is empty. Despite the flat beds, and the entertainment options, I am restless. My mother lurks in the background like a particularly bothersome flight attendant.

  I am one of only a handful of passengers on my deck. All are sleeping, having eaten in the Club lounge prior to boarding. The crew, taking advantage of the slack, gossip in secret recesses beyond the galley. I assume I am the only one awake. I ease myself up in the darkness and prise off my eye mask. The beds are arranged nose to tail, as though in homage to some unspoken erotic pleasure. To my astonishment I lock eyes with my neighbour, who has paused in his reading of the latest John Updike. He peers over the top of his spectacles.

  ‘Jet lag?’ he mouths.

  I grin and shake my head. ‘Pathetic, isn’t it!’ I whisper. ‘It’s three in the morning our time, and I’m wide awake!’

  ‘I know the feeling.’ The man removes his reading glasses. Late forties, I reckon. A youthful fifty at most. Clean-shaven, despite the hour, and with groomed greying hair. He wears a white linen shirt, which hangs in soft folds around his chest. Attractive laughter lines draw attention to his eyes, which are the luscious colour of washed mangoes. His accent is appropriately mid-Atlantic. ‘So, what were you in town for? Business or pleasure?’

  Believing it would be disingenuous to imply hard graft when the meeting had proved so exhilarating (Now, whaddya say we order in lunch, Amber! ), I admit to a bit of both. The stranger rolls his eyes as if to say, Isn’t that so New York?

  We’ve reached that awkward border crossing when conversing with strangers, a checkpoint between intimacy and solitude. To snuggle back into my cubicle might be misconstrued as a snub, yet to prolong conversation with a man who’d made arrangements to consort with literary nobility seems laced with presumption.

  And then it comes to me, unbidden as it were. That we float here in limbo, thousands of feet above the clouds, suspended between time zones. We can somersault beyond the gravitational pull of real life, into spaces beyond the reach of criticism, to experience free will in its purest form, unfettered by assumptions, mistakes or consequences; language, religion or nation. No background, no baggage. To meet without prejudice. To have not even traded names. To know only this: that to be human is to be free.

  I unbuckle my seatbelt, toss my blanket to the floor and step round to his cubicle. With his leg, he kicks the footrest into upright and leans forward to secure it; there is no pretence between us that I’ve merely come to chat. I hold his gaze before moving to stand before him, sliding my skirt and silk lining up over my thighs. He grasps my buttocks with large warm hands and pulls me gently towards him. I notice the smooth triangle of toffee skin at his neck where the top button is undone. I place a fingertip in the groove and stroke it lightly. His scent is subtle: an intoxicating blend of clean skin, musk and warm intelligence. I straddle him, and as he unzips himself I sink my knees into his seat. He kisses me forcefully, missing my mouth and almost biting my cheek, twisting my head to align our lips. His hand finds my knickers. He parts them slightly, and slides his finger inside me. My knees are sore from the seat’s rough fabric, but it does give very good leverage. Slowly I lower myself on to him.

  From the floor, John Updike’s dust jacket smile observes us, as if in approbation.

  *

  In a shower cubicle in the airport Club lounge, I press my forehead into the cold tiles and close my eyes. Needles of water pierce my naked back. My head throbs. If only this was just due to dehydration. I grip both taps until my knuckles tinge white. Survival, I have always felt, is about staying in control. Right now, I don’t recognise myself. I don’t know this other person, this woman who’s had sex with a stranger in the no-man’s land above the clouds. I must regain control, if only to defy my mother’s indifference. I have to retain control.

  Chapter Twenty

  BY THE TIME I’m through passport control and have switched on my phone, I have four missed calls. Louisa has gone into premature labour. The messages, a typically easy-going one from Matt and three feral ones from the mother-to-be, overlap in the wish that I join them at the hospital. Prue is driving in from Norfolk. I try to focus in my taxi on the domestic drama unfolding in town, to obliterate memories of the subsonic one.

  Which isn’t easy. When I recall my duplicity, I feel utterly numb. Shame makes me fractious and I barrack the driver. And all around me the drabness of the suburbs and the chaos of endless roadworks match what I see as my festering inner ugliness. I rest my head against the window, as if the weight of guilt makes my skull too heavy for my neck.

  William Edward, weighing in at less than four pounds, is sucked from Louisa’s stomach as my cab draws up outside the hospital entrance. As I pay the fare, he is uttering his first whimper. As I spin the revolving doors and approach reception, his puce, wrinkled body is being sponged and rushed from theatre to incubator, to be wired up to monitors. And as I run down squeaky corridors, a sedated Louisa is being wheeled back to her room, and Matt is removing his sky-blue theatre scrubs and joking with the obstetrics team. When I arrive at the labour ward, I find beautiful, clean Matt sitting reading a dog-eared society magazine. I hug him so tightly he begins to laugh.

  As we walk hand in hand to the vending machine, he describes the emergency Caesarean: how Louisa suffered potentially fatal side-effects to the drugs the hospital had administered to halt her contractions. Once these had been stopped, there was nothing the staff could do to delay William’s arrival, and she’d been rushed to theatre. At one point, it was feared the baby might arrive in the lift, and the midwife had had to hold a pad in place to stop the lowlying placenta slipping out.

  ‘I told Prue we’d wait till she got here,’ whispers Matt, blowing on scalding liquid once we reach Louisa’s room. ‘Is that all right? You look bushed. Couldn’t you sleep on the plane?’

  Sometimes when Matt is tired, his voice has a stronger Springbok lilt. It reminds me that he was once a little boy in another country far away, and I long to wrap him up in a blanket. I close my eyes. Against his shoulder, I am Sleeping Beauty. I listen as Matt speaks, w
ith his easy grasp of medical terminology, hacking at the briars of blood, and mucus, and morphine, before saving me with a kiss.

  Sometimes I fantasise that I am one of his patients; that he will sit on my bed and make all my horrid feelings go away. And sometimes when I’m in a really self-pitying mood, I will tell him this; and Matt will laugh and say I could never afford his fees.

  Louisa utters a moan just as Prue appears in the doorway – as though, even in sleep, she can sense her mother’s approach. As if the very air around a mother quivers with the static of maternal concern. Matt and I stand up.

  ‘How is she?’ gasps Prue, to no one in particular. Her voice is taut, her words clipped.

  At the sight of her mother, Louisa begins to weep. ‘They put a needle in my hand’, she mumbles repeatedly, and ‘Why weren’t you here?’ Prue sits on the bed and strokes Louisa’s fringe, ignoring the reproaches. She murmurs soothing sounds. Then she leans forward and gently kisses the new mother’s forehead.

  I suddenly feel very clammy. I offer to fetch Prue a coffee.

  As the liquid spurts into the cup, tears stream down my face and splash on to my shoes.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  OF ALL THE FRIENDS whose telephones throb with news of William’s premature arrival, one in particular has specific reason to thank He who moves in mysterious ways – for the birth proves to be indirectly responsible for the unusually high attendance at Dylan’s auditions. That evening, as we cram around Louisa’s bed, the gang finds itself unwittingly in Dylan’s parish. And, when Louisa becomes too weary for visitors, there is clearly (even for those who traditionally hide their social inertia behind a lack of childcare) no escape, as Dylan cheerily reminds us.

  Owing to a church hall timetable clash – a beetle drive for the local Youth Re-offending Team – we gather in the church itself. It feels different when not set up for a service. For one thing, all the heavy wooden pews have been moved to the sides, creating an empty space that appears to make our footsteps ring out more loudly on the flagstones. The triptych of stained-glass windows seems flatter, somehow, without bright sunlight pouring through them. And, without fresh flowers, or people in their Sunday best, I feel as though I’m trespassing on something intensely private.

  Just one area looks the same. At either side of the shallow steps leading to the chancel stand the wooden pedestal of a carved statue of the Virgin Mary, painted cream and blue, and an iron lectern with the wings of a bronze eagle forming the bookrest. Behind them I can see the altar draped in white cloth, topped with two burning candles, their flames flickering in the reredos of beaten gold. On the rare occasions I go to church, these objects barely register. But tonight, I feel glad to see them. We’re here for you, they seem to say. We’ll always be here.

  On one of the pews sits a clique of strangers. They glare at me as I nod at them and smile. Their eyes appear dark and lifeless. Dylan sidles up to me.

  ‘Don’t waste your breath trying to make them like you,’ he whispers. ‘Their jealousy of each other is exceeded only by their hatred of new people.’

  Dylan stands on the steps to the chancel and, adopting the single malt undertone he reserves for making parishioners do things they don’t want to do, urges us to form a circle for some warm-up exercises. Beneath the scraping of shoes on flagstones, there are detectable ripples of discontent, which Dylan bravely ignores. How, I ask myself, does he remain so upbeat amid such debilitating parish dynamics? No wonder he’s thinking of leaving the church.

  We are in the middle of a t’ai chi manoeuvre (led by Dylan whose knowledge of the art, learned on one of his retreats, is at best partial) when the west door is thrust aside by a figure resembling a female wizard. Wearing a diaphanous purple robe and menacing oversized treble-clef earrings, this creature strides to where the nave usually is.

  ‘Sorry I’m late, darling,’ she says, throatily. She air-kisses Dylan several inches from his cheeks, as though to avoid an infection. ‘I couldn’t tear myself away from Earl Spencer.’

  Harry, standing to my left, leans in towards me and discreetly raises his eyebrows. ‘She means the Earl of Spencer pub in Wandsworth.’ I have to stifle a snort.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce Bea, your director for the show.’ Dylan smiles beatifically. ‘And may I say how very lucky we are to have secured her services,’ he continues, which makes me think of dry-cleaners and tyre replacement concerns. Over near the Lady Chapel, the top crescents of the spectacles on the face of Julian, the church organist, are just visible above the parapet of the upright piano.

  I watch this woman. Already I envisage conflict. It isn’t that Bea resembles my mother in anything other than age. The most obvious difference is that Bea drapes her stockiness in flamboyant clothes, whereas my mother’s pipe-cleaner frame prefers ration-coupon grey. Or camel, when under pressure to be sociable (not that I can ever recall my parents receiving invitations). Bea also models a technique for applying make-up that appears to consist of tossing the contents of her cosmetics bag into the air and standing underneath. But then she is a thespian, a career Bea is now detailing, from her salad days in the 1970s hoofing it naked in Hair – which frankly I don’t believe – to directing one-off pilots for television; shows with unfamiliar names and obviously ignominious fortunes. ‘She’ll be telling us next she knew Noël Coward,’ says Harry in a stage whisper of which Bea would be proud. Her performance contrives to be amusingly self-deprecating (at which laughing is mandatory) and, for me, conceited. It doesn’t bode well. Already I can sense the power lines being drawn up.

  ‘Why’, I ask Dylan, in a break, ‘did you get someone like her involved?’

  Apparently Bea runs drama classes at a school where Dylan’s a governor. It’s obvious to me that, not only has he fallen under her Boadicean spell, but that he hopes she might act as a bulwark between him and Pamela.

  God, how much energy we adults spend in trying to keep our parents at bay.

  He asks after the audition I’ve just had.

  ‘It was fine,’ I say, casually. ‘Julian played some scales which loosened my voice up nicely. And then, as I hand him my music, Bea asks me who my singing teacher is, and of course I have to confess I don’t have one, so she gives me this passing-wind look before asking me what song I’m going to sing, and then, can you believe it, when I tell her she says, “Oh, but that’s a black song. I have real issues with white girls doing obviously black songs—”’

  ‘She called it a black song?’ whispers Dylan. ‘Streuth, she’s worse than my mother—’

  ‘I mean, it’s George fucking Gershwin! How can anyone have an issue with that? So, yes, thanks for asking, my audition went brilliantly.’

  ‘Well, hopefully she’ll have been just as snooty to the parish clique, and they’ll drop out. Primadonnas, every one. You can’t believe how difficult they were over my plans for last Christmas’s inaugural In Excelsis Deo extravaganza. I’d ordered dry ice and everything. And anyway, I’ve told Bea that if she doesn’t give you a decent part, I’m pulling the show!’

  ‘You can’t do that,’ I laugh.

  ‘Why not? It’s my gaff. It’s my hall. I can do what I bloody well like.’

  ‘Still, I’m not sure I can fit all the rehearsing in. I’ve got this huge project—’

  ‘You’ve got to. This show’s going to be my swan song. I want to go out with a bang.’

  I gasp, and hold his gaze. ‘A swan song? I’m afraid I have real issues with humans doing swan songs—’

  Dylan pretends to throttle me.

  The session after the break is exhausting. During a dance-through of the show’s opening number, Dylan tries to avoid bumping into the statue of the Virgin Mary and collides instead with Jenny’s angora-clad breasts. They both retire, feigning injury. When Bea next calls a break, everyone else collapses on to pews, facing each other from opposite sides of the nave – an audience at a medieval jousting contest.

  ‘Couldn’t you raise money for your
roof by having a raffle, like other vicars?’ groans Clive, who came to drop Jenny off at the audition and got bounced by Dylan into contorting his angle-poise joints into unnatural positions for the good of the chorus. ‘Seriously, the lost opportunity costs, not to mention the low indicators of delivering on budget—’ And there was me thinking management consultants were boring. Jenny tells her husband to shush. ‘Anyway, I think I’ve got cramp,’ he concludes, rolling up a trouser leg to knead the flesh of his skinny calf. Sitting next to him, I can’t help noticing that this exposed leg is utterly hairless. Almost shiny, as though waxed. It’s so abnormally smooth I have to will myself not to reach out and touch it, not least because it jars with the hirsute image Clive puts about with his abundant moustache. How little we know the people we know.

  ‘I’d be fine if it wasn’t for Bea,’ says Harry, swigging tap water from a bottle recycled so often that what remains of the label is now white. ‘You’ve found a right taskmaster there.’

  ‘She’s terrifying,’ says Serena, who is peeling an orange and handing around segments. ‘She reminds me of my old primary school teacher, a ghastly woman who played electric guitar and wore scarlet lipstick. Once, she came to school wearing a mantilla complete with black veil. I was off my food for a week I was so terrified.’

  ‘You have unhappy memories of childhood?’ I say.

  ‘Oh God, yes. Who doesn’t?’ Serena turns to face me, a mother being scrupulously attentive to her child. My friends aren’t just my family; they’ve become my parents. ‘It’s all changed now, of course, with marvellous people like Harry involved.’ Here Serena leans forward to pat her husband’s knee, which startles him, since he’s talking to Jenny about the latest educational psychology on multiple-birth siblings. ‘But back then I hated it. I had asthma, and was always off sick. And because both my parents worked, I was cared for by a succession of neighbours. And because I missed lots of classes, I was called stupid and idle. I swear I’ve spent more time in a primary school since Eleanor was born, what with parents’ evenings and concerts, than I ever did as a child!’